Float Venice to save it from rising seas, study says

In this file photo, tourists take photos of each other in the flooded Saint Mark's square in Venice.

To protect Venice from periodic floods that are increasingly heightened by the double whammy of rising seas levels and sinking land, a team of Italian researchers suggests lifting up the canal-laced city by pumping seawater into the aquifers below it.

Doing so could result in a uniform uplift of about 30 centimeters over a 10-year period of steady, coordinated pumping via a series of 12 wells that circle the city, according to a study reported in the journal Water Resources Research.

The idea isn't entirely new, but until now its applicability was clouded by a limited understanding of Venice's underlying soils.

The researchers overcame this obstacle by combing through seismic data — obtained in the 1980s by an Italian oil and gas company — to create a 3-D reconstruction of the soils.

Pore pressure corresponds to water between grains of sediment that can bear some of the load. Subsidence occurs when water is pumped out — as occurred in Venice in the mid-1900s — and the grains pack together, causing the land to sink.

In theory, pumping water back into the soils could reverse this trend, but in reality a full recovery isn't possible, notes Ars Technica.

Importantly, the coordinated injection of the seawater can prevent one side of the city rising up faster than another, which could crumble the infrastructure — buildings, roads, etc. — that the project aims to protect.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

As computing power increases exponentially, the ways we relate to computers become more natural — and more ubiquitous. Msnbc.com's Wilson Rothman explores the evolution of interfaces, from primitive punch cards to interactive buildings.